In applied historical research, geographic units often differ in level of aggregation across datasets. One solution is to use crosswalks that associate factors located within one geographic unit to another, based on their relative areas. We develop an alternative approach based on relative...

Efforts to document long-term trends in socioeconomic mobility in the United States have been hindered by the lack of large, representative datasets that include information linking parents to their adult children. This problem has been especially acute for women, who are more difficult to link...

During the early years of its existence, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) assembled an extensive data set on all aspects of the pre-WWII macroeconomy. Until 1978, this data set existed only on the handwritten sheets to which the early NBER researchers copied the data from original...

In this chapter, we discuss field experiments in surveys that are conducted with the purpose of learning about expectation formation and the link between expectations and behavior. We begin by reviewing the rationale for conducting experiments within surveys, rather than just relying on...

Audit correspondence studies are field experiments that test for discriminatory behavior in active markets. Researchers measure discrimination by comparing how responsive individuals ("audited units") are to correspondences from different types of people. This paper elaborates on the tradeoffs...

Economic data engineering deliberately designs novel forms of data to solve fundamental identification problems associated with economic models of choice. I outline three diverse applications: to the economics of information; to life-cycle employment, earnings, and spending; and to public policy...

Linear panel models, and the "event-study plots" that often accompany them, are popular tools for learning about policy effects. We discuss the construction of event-study plots and suggest ways to make them more informative. We examine the economic content of different possible identifying...

This paper tests the retrieved context model of Wachter and Kahana (2019) using a long-term panel of economic forecasts by participants in the Livingston Survey. Events in historical time contribute additional explanatory power to a relative time series model. Historical precedents for current...

In many health domains, we are concerned that observed links - for example, between "healthy" behaviors and good outcomes - are driven by selection into behavior. This paper considers the additional factor that these selection patterns may vary over time. When a particular health behavior...